Worlds to Conquer

Explorers might take heart. So might their angels. The world, said Explorer Roy Chapman Andrew* in the New York Times Magazine this week, was not hopelessly over-explored.

No latter-day Magellan could still be "the first to burst into that silent sea." No atomic-age Hernando Cortes would pose as a god to a modern Montezuma. Geographically, the world had been pretty well raked over. The only sizable blanks remaining were near the Poles, and they were mostly wastes of ice & snow.

The greatest prize left to modern exploration, thinks Andrews, is Amnyi Machen, a peak in eastern Tibet which may be higher than Everest. Pilots claim to have seen it from the air, but no one has measured it.

Prizes to Find. Other prizes lie in New Guinea, where stone-age" fuzzy-wuzzies, ignorant of the outside world, live in high, cool "white man's country."

But modem explorers who hope to make real contributions (or headlines) will have to do more than just go places. They will have to be willing and able to make scientific observations. "The forests of Brazil," says Explorer Andrews, "have been mapped from the air, but they are virtually unknown. Men will go there to seek medicinal plants, to study birds and animals and to learn about the forest peoples and their way of life."

Andrews sees a silver lining in the sudden interest which the U.S. military are showing toward Alaska, whose eternally frozen soil is an ancient, well-stocked deepfreeze. "Mammoths preserved in cold storage for 100,000 years are not infrequently uncovered. Scientists should be behind [the bulldozers] to examine the frozen earth for fossils which will tell the story of our own lost history. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the body of one of the earliest human migrants to Alaska may be discovered."

"In the North Polar regions," says Andrews, "are problems of a different nature. . . . We have a great deal to learn about weather in the Arctic regions, the movement of ice, what lies at the bottom of the Arctic seas. . . . Today that region means rapid transport, strategic air bases, weather stations. . . . The Arctic will soon become a Broadway for intercontinental transport. . . ."

Even in well-known lands there is plenty of work to do in geology, botany, zoology. Commercial explorers will look for minerals with all the complex paraphernalia of geophysical prospecting. The most exciting prize now is uranium. The standard equipment of modern explorers will be a Geiger counter.

* Whose own explorations and findings in Central Asia, when fully described, will fill twelve quarto volumes.

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